martinzoo

GB and I were totally focused on our Language Arts day. He had a spelling test, got new words for next week, learned about writing for the reader, and took a chapter test.

96%, thank you very much!

We also did some work in his Getty & Dubay Handwriting book.

And he did some more Complete-a-Sketch.

It was all going normally for a Language Arts day.

Until this guy walked across the floor and FREAKED me out!

Once suitably contained, we were able to observe him in relative safety. We quickly identified him as a wolf spider (Because we’ve seen them lots of times before). Then we pulled out the books and magazines we have that deal with arachnids. And we checked on our trusty computer. GB’s best moment of the day was when I screachingly yelled at  told him to NOT tilt the container so much. Good Lord! My heart!

Under our stereoscope, we noticed the joints on him.  Each joint looked like an open wound. And the stereoscope was really able to show off how much dust and debris he had gathered from my floor. I guess I need to vacuum again.

In this picture you can see the front part of his body, called the cephalothorax and the pedipalp, which is alongside his jaw and is used to hold his prey while he bites it with his fangs. Ugh!

A wolf spider has eight legs, which we all know about. But upon further research GB and I learned that they also have eight, yes EIGHT, eyes. This is why you can’t sneak up on the critters. The set furthest back, on top, sees UP. The set to the side sees SIDEWAYS, and the four in the front see FORWARDS. The picture above was taken with MY camera, and edited with numbers to show you the eyes. Seriously grossing myself out right now.

Funnily enough, I had a conversation just last week about wolf spiders with one of the moms in my homeschool group. I told her that I thought wolf spiders (because that’s all I ever see in this house) had been getting in GB’s bed and biting him during the night. And she insisted that that could not be true because wolf spiders were non-aggressive and harmless.

Harmless! OMG! How can you say that a spider is harmless? Don’t heart attacks count as harmful?

So while we were doing our research on the wee arachnid, I thought I’d look up some facts on it’s  toxicity. And I quote from this site:

Venom toxicity - the bite of the Wolf Spider is poisonous but not lethal. Although non-aggressive, they bite freely if provoked and should be considered dangerous to humans. The bite may be very painful. First aid and medical attention should be sought as soon as possible, particularly as to children or the elderly.

And more from this site:

Even though the wolf spider is poisonous, its venom is not lethal. The wolf spider is not known to be aggressive; however, they will bite if they feel like they are in harm or danger. They also move extremely fast when they are disturbed. If bitten by a wolf spider, the wound should not be bandaged but an ice pack should be placed on the bite so that the swelling will go down. And if necessary the victim should avoid any movement if at all possible. It is extremely important that one sees medical attention if bitten by a wolf spider or any other spider.

And from our own Virginia Cooperative Extension office:

Most homeowners have misconceptions about spiders-they are pictured to be poisonous (even deadly), and likely to attack at any time. Wrong. The only dangerous spiders we have in Virginia are the brown recluse spider and the black widow spider.

So she was kind of right, they do refer to it as harmless and non-aggressive.

BUT …… If it bites, and injects a venom……. that could be cause for medical attention………. when it is provoked….. like, say, rolling over on it while you sleep………… I think *I’ll* call that a BAD, harmful, agressive spider. I don’t like ones with fangs!

It can stay outside.

Which is exactly where this guy is going. Because GB would never allow me my first inclination, which is to squish.

So I guess we had a tiny little unit study today, impromptu. I suppose it was kinda cool.

No mommies were harmed in today’s studies.

While I was outside watering my flowers today, I saw this gorgeous butterfly.

I’m no expert. I’m not even conversational about butterflies. And really, I wasn’t even sure it was a butterfly. I tend to call every pretty thing that looks like this a butterfly. But it could have been a moth. Some moths are stunningly beautiful!

So we went to this website to see if we could identify it, and we came to a page on Eastern Tiger Swallowtails. I’m pretty sure we found the right one. So I searched Google for just the Swallowtails and found this page.

My favorite piece of new information on this butterfly was that the black is the background color and the yellow are the stripes. Isn’t that cool? I would have thought it would be the other way around. I’m also pretty sure we had a female. I wish I could follow it and find some eggs.

I’ll tell you what, if you scroll to the very bottom of that second page you’ll see that they are pretty ugly caterpillars. Can you imagine all that beauty coming from that caterpillar. Wow!

The other day I happened to read on another web site that crickets really like fish food. Well, GB and I maintain a cricket habitat to feed the firebelly toads and the skink. We buy about 4 dozen every other week, and we lose at least a third of them. I’ve been using the gel stuff that they sell in the pet store for crickets. But after reading about them liking fish food we decided to give it a try and see how they well they liked it.

Whoa! These guys were not messing around. They loved the fish food, which is great because I have lots of fish food. GB and I were fascinated because you could actually see them taking bites of the food. The flakes had little bite marks on them. And they were swarming the dish. It was funny because some of them were fighting over the same pieces.

Being a boy, GB thought that was way cool!

Today I made a very sad discovery.

All but five of our 108 tadpoles have been killed by something. There were two water beetles swimming around in the habitat, but I don’t know if they are the culprits. All I know is that this morning when I went out to feed the tadpoles they seemed to be fine. Late this afternoon………………. they were all floating. I don’t have high hopes for the final five, either. I’m very sad about this. I had gotten quite attached to our little guys. We had raised them from eggs, and at least ten of them had grown up and gone off on their own. But it just saddens me to lose so many, so quickly.

I also had a pretty little flower plant that has quite suddenly succumbed to junebugs. Oh, those little critters were having a feast! The leaves on my plant are totally lacy now. It was quite gross when I glanced over, intending to water the flowers and noticed ALL those bugs! Ugh! ………… I am making my totally annoyed face right now……….. just so you know……..

On the bright side, they haven’t touched these yet. See my pretty sunflowers? I stole the seeds from my bird seed. It’s funny, because if you look at the second picture closely, you’ll see a cool comparison. The ones closest to the deck came from one bag of bird seed, and the ones closest to the camera came from a different bag of bird seed. The leaves are totally different. The closer ones haven’t bloomed yet, but I think maybe within the week I should be able to see the difference in the flowers.

See the difference in the leaves?

Now I just have to keep a vigilant eye out for sunflower predators. Last year a squirrel came up on my deck and grabbed the whole flower and took off to the woods! He left me with a pot and some roots. Kind of him, wasn’t it?

This year we’ve had a bumper crop of ticks. And GB is a tick magnet!

Between the two of us, we’ve had 65 ticks. I know this because HE is keeping count. It’s a good thing he’s not grossed out by this…….like his mom. He just gets annoyed by the time it takes to get them out.

It’s those itty, bitty ones that are so ridiculously hard to get to.

I even broke down and had my husband sprinkle the yard with that insect dust. I held out for a long time because I was worried about the effect it would have on our nice backyard habitat. But I can’t handle the thought of all these #@*! r ticks! I got some organic bug spray to spray on GB before I know he’s going out…………… But I don’t always know when he’s decided to run out and putter around the yard.

Anyway, we’ve gotten a system for getting these guys out of the body. And we cheer embarrassingly when we get the whole thing out intact.

First, you must have an excellent pair of tweezers. My fingernails used to be good enough, but I no longer trust them. Once you’ve torn a tick to bits and some of it is still left in you, that ends the use of fingernails.

Next you must inspect the area and clean it up really well.

GB thinks this part is funny. Back at tick number five or six, I started laying a cotton ball drenched in alcohol on top of the tick, and GB said I was getting them drunk. So now we say we are getting them drunk. It’s a good way to make sure the area is clean, too. I also clean my tweezers with it.

Then you take the tweezers as close to the skin as possible and pull with a firm, steady pressure, until it comes out.

The two we retrieved today came out intact, even though they were the teeny, weeny kind. I guess we’re getting good.

I don’t like that!

Remember these little guys?

Here, you can see one of the caterpillars in it’s classic “J” formation. They form the chrysalis just a few hours later.

And 10 to 14 days later they emerge as butterflies.

This was just minutes after emerging from it’s chrysalis. And the following video is taken just moments after the butterfly broke through his chrysalis. We were totally bummed that we missed the actually busting through. We tried to catch the others, but you know how life goes, as soon as your back turns, something cool happens.

I have no idea what the dramatic music goes with; something that GB was watching, I’m sure.

Time to let them be free…….!

One last caress…….

I love this look of awe!

The butterfly’s first pit stop.

Bye bye butterfly!

Our challenge today was to mark off one small (12″) square and really study the life that went on in that tiny, little square.

These bluish, whitish flowers are called bluets or quaker ladies. I like the name quaker ladies, because I think it’s cute.

We saw this fern-like plant, but haven’t identified it yet.

Our notebook kept having little visitors. I’m not sure what this tiny guy was. He was actually moving pretty fast. I’d say he was about a 1/3 of an inch long. And he sort of had a centipede-like look to his body. But it was hard to tell in the 10-15 seconds that he spent on the page.

I couldn’t tell if this was a spider or an ant. So I blew the pic up a bit.

And I still can’t tell. It looks like a spider to me. But GB and I have checked Google, and Google images and can’t seem to find one that looks quite like it. Poor GB, I’m not a good bug researcher.

I DO know what this sucker is. And he, along with 11 of his little friends prompted a tiny argument between GB and I. This is the second time in less than a week that GB and I have had altercations with ticks. I took 12 off of GB yesterday, thankfully none had penetrated the skin. But the one that I took off earlier in the week was in a very delicate place. No need to elaborate. So I was annoyed by the little varmints. And I may have made a not-so-nice comment directed at God, that went kind of like this:

Me ~ “I don’t see any dadgum reason why God would have created these foul little critters!”

GB ~ “Are you saying that God made a mistake? Because I don’t think He would like that. I’m sure there must be a reason for ticks to live. Like, maybe they are food for some other animal.”

So, I was properly chastised. We came inside, looked ticks up on the internet, and found out that there are three basic groupings of ticks.

The American Dog tick

The Deer tick

And the Lone Star tick (we see plenty of these)

We also found out that ticks are arachnids, cousins of spiders.

AND we found out that some birds, including robins (that’s poetry, I tell you!), eat ticks. And fire ants eat ticks too. In fact, in some locations fire ants have decimated the tick population. Hmmmm…….. which would I rather have? I’ve never actually had an interaction with a fire ant, so I guess I can’t say.

We had a blast in our nature class today. We spent almost no time at all in the classroom. We only touched on the fact that you can learn about how healthy a pond or lake is by seeing which critters are living in it. Miss Christen was hoping we would find some mayfly larvae or some gilled snails that are completely pollution intolerant, because that would mean that we have a very healthy, clean pond.

We used the same nets that we used last week but we scooped the contents into these buckets. After letting them settle for a bit, we would search for life. Then, using the spoons, we would capture the creatures and put them into the ice cube trays for further inspection.

It’s way more fun to work with a friend.

Here is a photo of some of our earlier finds: two tadpoles, mayfly larvae, damselfly larvae, and we also caught a minnow which we let go. We also found a cricket frog, a water scorpion, a gilled snail (yeah!), and a crawdad!

One of the most interesting things we learned was that crawdads are so tough that they used to use them in medieval times to create a shield of armor for men who couldn’t afford a traditional one. They were known as “Douvner Doublets.”

This is the water scorpion that we found. They are one of the pond’s predators. They look a lot like a praying mantis in the water. But these little guys will actually eat the tadpoles that we found.

And this is a picture of a gilled snail. Because of the presence of this guy and the mayfly larvae, we were able to determine that our pond is pollution-free.

GB and I enjoyed this class so much that we are going to try to make our own net and go pond dipping in our own neighborhood to test the water quality.